At 3:00 on the
morning of December 15, 1836, a Patent Office messenger sleeping in the
building awoke to thick smoke emanating from the basement. He acted quickly,
rousing his colleagues to make a desperate attempt to enter
the portion of the building that housed the patent documents. Outside the
patent room, they
encountered blocked doors, heavy smoke, and unreachable windows. By the time
the fire department arrived, it was too late; the Patent Office was doomed,
and eventually burnt to the ground.

Tragically,
an estimated 7,000 models, 9,000 drawings and 230 books- as well as
applications, correspondence, and patent copies- were destroyed by the
blaze. Some of these documents were recovered with the help of inventors who
still held the
original patents, but a cursory examination of the
records recovered by the Patent Office revealed that their efforts to restore
the archive were not very successful. Unfortunately, many of the
destroyed patents were issued between 1790 and 1822, and had expired at the
time of the fire; this made the recovery process even more difficult (Early
Unnumbered U.S. Patents, 1790-1836). Of the estimated 10,000 patents issued before
1836, only 2,800 were ever recovered (Dood, Kendall S., Patent
Drawings:Milestone
Documents in the National Archives). Very few of the recovered patents are
extant today.

The
following pages detail our unique collection of surviving patent documents signed by
some of the most notable and revered presidents in American history. These
documents are signed by such luminaries as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John
Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, among others. Patents
were typically signed by both the President and Secretary of
State, and, since four of the five presidents elected after Washington also
served as Secretary of State, many of these early patent documents are
actually endorsed by two presidents.